Tracking and verification of products is critical to many businesses and service industries. Companies are continually looking for increasingly effective methods for tracking their products. Moreover, counterfeiting of goods, and importation of so-called xe2x80x9cgray-marketxe2x80x9d goods threaten a company""s ability to maintain effective control and tracking of its products.
The invention relates to an optical system for the individual tracking or verification of a variety of items. This tracking system may be used in manufacturing, distribution, warehouses, or retail locations for inventory control as well as tracking, sorting, validating or counting specific items such as casino chips or tokens, hardware items, computer diskettes and CD-ROMs, VCR tapes, perfumes, pharmaceutical products, alcoholic products, clothing labels, identification (ID) tags for personnel, and the like. This system may also be used to track and verify pharmaceutical items and packaging, luggage, and manufactured goods or shipments (such as UPS, FedEx, Airborne, DHL, or U.S. Mail items). This system may further be used as a quality control system such as returned goods, or determining counterfeit stock.
The invention selectively matches a particular wavelength (or small set of wavelengths, such as a spectrum) of light or other energy produced by an illuminator (or illumination source), with a material which is sensitive to that illumination. This material is placed, printed, or applied to an object sought to be identified or tagged. When a reading or verification is desired, the special illuminator at the specified wavelength (or wavelength spectrum) is used to excite the material, making it visible to a detector.